intensity (în-tèn´sî-tê)
nounplural intensities1. Exceptionally great concentration,
power, or force.2. Physics. The amount or
degree of strength of electricity, light,
heat, or sound per unit area or volume.3. Color. a. The strength
of a color, especially the degree to which it lacks its complementary color.
b. saturation.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally
be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values
and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.
In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities
and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped
faces of childhood.Maya
Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 4
(1969), said of one's hometown.

Existence

Existence is no more than
the precarious attainment of relevance
in an intensely mobile flux
of past, present, and future.Susan Sontag (b. 1933),
U.S. essayist. Styles of Radical Will, "'Thinking Against Oneself': Reflections
on Cioran" (1969).

Talent

Talent is an amalgam of high
sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing,
touching, smelling, tasting- intensely); a vivid imagination
as well as a grip on reality;
the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make
one's self heard and seen.Uta Hagen (b. 1919), U.S. actor.
Respect for Acting, pt. 1, ch. 1 (1973).

Goodness

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely
and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of
many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), English poet.
A Defence of Poetry (written 1821; published 1840).

Country Life

The village had institutionalized
all human functions in forms of low intensity. . . . Participation was
high and organization was low. This is the formula for stability.Marshall
McLuhan (1911-80), Canadian communications theorist. Understanding Media,
ch. 10 (1964).

A man of my spiritual intensity
does not eat corpses.George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950),
Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Quoted in: Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw:
His Life and Personality, ch. 9 (1942). Shaw, Pearson reported, believed
vegetarians had radically different experiences from meat-eaters: "The
odd thing about being a vegetarian is, not that the things that happen
to other people don't happen to me- they all do- but that they happen differently:
pain is different, pleasure different, fever different, cold different,
even love different."

Fame

The love of the famous, like all strong passions,
is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it
is independent of persons.Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. The Benefactor,
ch. 9 (1963).

Noses

The modern nose, like the
modern eye, has developed a sort of microscopic, intercellular intensity
which makes our human contacts
painful and revolting.Marshall McLuhan (1911-80),
Canadian communications theorist. The Mechanical Bride, "How Not to Offend"
(1951).

Talent

We are told that talent creates
its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates
not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.Eric Hoffer (1902-83), U.S.
philosopher. The Passionate State of Mind, aph. 18 (1955).

Anthropology

Anthropology has always struggled with an intense,
fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [The anthropologist] submits
himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation
as an urban intellectual.Susan Sontag (b. 1933), U.S. essayist. Quoted
in: Neville Dyson-Hudson, "Structure and Infrastructure in Primitive Society"
(published in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. by R. Macksey and E. Donato,
1970).

Class

Class is rarely talked about
in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the
reality of class differences than in educational settings.bell hooks (b. c. 1955),
African American author and educator. Teaching to Transgress, ch. 12 (1994).
hooks had been raised in very modest circumstances in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

Belief

When the intensity of emotional
conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search
for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.Bertrand Russell (1872-1970),
British philosopher, mathematician. A Free Man's Worship and Other Essays,
ch. 2 (1976).

Rebellion

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a
worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and
relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct
to revolt.Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76), Russian political theorist.
The International and Karl Marx (1872; repr. in Bakunin on Anarchism, ed.
by Sam Dolgoff, 1980).

Fashion

Fashion is the most intense
expression of the phenomenon of neomania, which has grown ever since the
birth of capitalism. Neomania assumes that purchasing the new is the same
as acquiring value. . . . If the purchase of a new garment coincides with
the wearing out of an old one, then obviously there is no fashion. If a
garment is worn beyond the moment of its natural replacement, there is
pauperization. Fashion flourishes on surplus, when someone buys more than
he or she needs.Stephen Bayley (b. 1951),
British design critic. Taste, pt. 2, "Fashion: Being and Dressing" (1991).

The freeway experience .
. . is the only secular communion Los Angeles has. . . . Actual participation
requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind
of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm
takes over.Joan Didion (b. 1935), U.S.
essayist. The White Album, "The Bureaucrats" (1979; first published 1976).

Cities and City Life

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic,
synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the
effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their
instantaneous magnetism.Jean
Baudrillard (b. 1929), French semiologist. Cool Memories, ch. 3 (1987;
tr. 1990).

Research

Not many appreciate the ultimate
power and potential usefulness of basic knowledge accumulated by obscure,
unseen investigators who, in a lifetime of intensive study, may never see
any practical use for their findings but who go on seeking answers to the
unknown without thought of financial or practical gain.Eugenie Clark (b. 1922),
U.S. marine biologist, author. The Lady and the Sharks, ch. 1 (1969).

Clubs

To associate with other like-minded
people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and
women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will
add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify
it almost to ecstasy.Aldous
Huxley (1894-1963), British author. Beyond the Mexique Bay, "Chichicastenango"
(1934).

The amount of information
available to each person, measured in bits by neurons and processed
with the help of the complementary prostheses of the brain, is nowadays increasing
at an exponential rate. The intensity
of time
is increasing. Temporal bubbles
form and evolve
with their own dynamics. The creation of new information, the sharing of information
through newnetworks
curve space-time, produces a basin, an attractor.
In contrast to the way in which thermodynamic capital is diminished when one
uses it, irreversibly transforming itself into entropy, what could be termed
a "symbiotic"
capital increases its value with increased usage: it produces more and more
interests.

3. Develop external networks
for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time
with people are smart or smarter than you. We assume that you are
the Intelligence Agent from you gene pool, so you will seek Intelligence
Agents from other gene-pools who will stimulate you to get smarter.

A cool medium, like hieroglyphic or idiogamic written
characters, has very different effects from the hot and explosive medium
of the phonetic alphabet. The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract
visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity,
burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme
individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly. But the typical reversal
occurred when extremes of monopoly brought back the corporation, with its impersonal
empire over many lives. The hotting up of the medium of writing to repeatable
prints intensity, led to nationalism and the religious wars of the 16th Century.
The heavy and unwieldy media such as stone, are time-binders,
used for writing, they are very cool indeed, and serve to unify the age, whereas
paper is a hot medium, which serves to unify space horizontally, both in political
and entertainmentempires.”

"The crowd is open so long as its
growth is not impeded; it is closed when its growth is limited… The stagnating
crowd lives for its discharge… the process
here starts not with equality but with density… In the rhythmic crowd…
density and equality coincide from the beginning. Everything here depends on
movement."

The rhythmic, or throbbing crowd is characterised
by a specific state of communal excitement: "the means of achieving this
state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied,"
not moving, but gathering intensity at one place and creating frenzy.